Anthonares

In case you don’t come to this entry steeped in the space-related blogosphere, suffice it to say that many, many entries have been written about what space advocates need to do to push our cause to the general public. So, to communicate intellectually to an audience what we advocates generally view much more emotionally, we use analogy.

The most popular analogy floating around right now is to relate the NewSpace industries to the beginning of civilian general aviation (this isn’t to ignore the long played-out comparison of space exploration to that of the 15th century New World). The sub-orbital companies are the barnstormers of a century ago, flying for the sake of flying, and opening the public’s eyes to general aviation. Government air-mail contracts of yesteryear become the COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) of today. And of course, the maturation of civil aviation into the ubiquitous industry it is today becomes the hope for the future of NewSpace.

Here’s to hoping that analogy is soon retired. As recently noted by self-described NewSpace contrarian David S. Portree, the analogy isn’t any good. Portree views this errant analogy as an overreach–I view it as overly limiting. Instead, I’ll present a new analogy while recognizing that it is imperfect: the advent of spaceflight is very much like that of the boat.

Unfortunately for this new meme, history has not passed to us exactly when the boat was invented, or who did the inventing. And, we don’t know how it changed that culture. But, we do know what it enabled, and that’s where my analogy gets started Continue Reading »

Back in April I sent an unsolicited application offering my part-time consulting services to 4Frontiers, a company formed just a few months earlier. A month or so later I received an interested reply from one of the heads of the company, but I got too busy to work up a CV and a few other materials he wanted of me. By July I’d nearly forgotten about it, and when I remembered it just assumed it was an opportunity lost at the time.
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If you happen to have been reading this blog for the last year or so, you may have noticed that I sometimes find myself at odds with Jeffrey Bell, the occasional opinion writer at Space Daily.com. Here’s a link to his latest column, but let me summarize it for you:

“Back in my day, we solved all these darned ‘Centennial Challenges’ but you young’uns are too thick to pay attention.”

Seriously, that’s a pretty accurate representation of what he’s saying. For those not familiar with Jeffrey Bell, his tagline is

Jeffrey F. Bell is a former space scientist and recovering pro-space activist.

That just about sums it all up right there. Nearly every single column he writes attacks the current new space movement from the tired perspective of “been there, done that”. But let me tell you something Mr. Bell, your generation of space activists and engineers did not actually succeed in getting us all into space!
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Apparently, NASA’s facing a rather-paltry $100 million dollar budget shortfall for fiscal year 2007. So what is it considering cutting? Of course, “all options are on the table” which is to say “all low priority activities are on the table”. What is one of those low priority options? Why, ISS science research!

Scientists have said for years that the ISS research program is little more than an orbiting science fair, so this is probably just an admission of what has been painfully true for some time. The cut would only be for 2007 and would presumably not apply to research into the effects of microgravity and radiation on human health. But either way, microgravity research was one of the prime justifications for the ISS.

We’ve heard this story before, though, haven’t we? Launching and servicing expensive commercial and military satellites was one of the prime justifications for the Shuttle program. Some of the early shuttle flights did just that, but after a while it became clear that servicing them was just too expensive, and that there were far cheaper options available for launching.

Program- vs. Mission-Driven

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While most folks remember Apollo for the videos and photos it returned of a foreign, desolate world, some of the science experiments left behind have gone under-appreciated. Two of the science experiments, the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment and the lunar seismometers (Passive Seismic Experiments), returned data long after the astronauts left. While the lunar seismometers were turned off in 1977, the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment (LLRE) continues to this day, and has produced some incredible results. For instance, we now know that the Moon still has a liquid core, that the fundamental gravitational constant G is either static or is evolving very very slowly, that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicts the Moon’s orbit better than we can measure it, and that the Moon is receding from us at a rate of about 3.8 cm/year.

The primary reason that the LLRE has been so successful is that it is allows for almost unlimited upgradeability in precision, is free to use, and costs no money to maintain. In the 35 years since the first LLRE reflector was deployed by the Apollo 11 astronauts, dozens of teams have used the laser reflectors to learn more about lunar geology and the evolution of the Earth/Moon system, as well as to conduct basic physics research. Scientists continue to use the LLRE reflectors today and are constantly improving their accuracy so that in the coming years new research can be conducted with these astounding little experiments.
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In my undergraduate cosmology class my professor introduced this satellite as having brought about quantitative cosmolgy. While that’s probably just a bit of an exaggeration, this little craft definitely revolutionized the science. Prior to the launch of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) (and to a much smaller degree its predecessor, COBE), cosmology, the study of the evolution of the universe, was a mess of theories and ages. But after a series of papers published in 2003 detailing the first year of data collection from WMAP, the universe suddenly had a definite age, 13.7 billion years, and was shown to be dominated by dark energy.

Since then, WMAP has been the darling of the astronomy community and has undoubtedly led hundreds of eager young undergraduates into cosmology. The science community knew that WMAP was still collecting data, but I’m not sure that anyone really expected the news released last week (discussed at Cosmic Variance and at Bad Astronomy, here are the technical publications). The age of the universe was left unchanged at 13.7 billion years, but the date of first star formation was moved to 400 million years in better agreement with theory. Also, the first true evidence for cosmic inflation was presented as well.

It was an exciting announcement from a team that has already done so much for the field of cosmology. To better understand just why the WMAP mission is so important, I’ve put together this relatively brief summary of the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background in the last decade. These three missions have changed our prospective and refined our vision. Cosmology is now a field of true quantitative prediction that bears little resemblance to the unorganized conjecture of two decades ago.
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Almost two weeks ago, Cassini mission scientists published a host of results pertaining to Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus. The world had been given a hint of what to expect from the image on the right released last November that revealed a geyser of material spewing away from the south polar region of the moon. We were treated to a literal feast of fantastic results, summarized in this perspectives article by Jeffrey Kargel (a hydrologist at University of Arizona). Because of the importance of these new papers, the journal Science is offering free access to the 11 articles published in the March 10th issue relating to Cassini and Enceladus. You can spend $10 to buy the newsstand edition, gotta love free and open science!

As much as I would love to review all of the Enceladus science, so many important discoveries could not receive the attention or care they deserve in a single blog entry. Instead I will focus just on the discovery of watery geysers emanating from Enceladus’ south polar region. I will focus on the two papers detail the discovery of water ice in that jet of material, though two additional papers provide the important linkage between that jet and relatively warm surface features. The so-called tiger-stripes seen on Enceladus occur on a geologically very recent portion of the moon’s crust (Porco and others), and are shown to be about 70 degrees warmer than the surrounding crust. This makes the tiger stripes about 145 Kelvin, or -128 Celsius, while the surrounding crust is a chilly 70 Kelvin (Spencer and others).

Citations

• Hansen, CJ, and 7 others (2006). “Enceladus’ Water Vapor Plume.” Science 311(5766), pp. 1422-1425. [online at CiteULike.org]
• Waite, HJ, and 13 others (2006). “Cassini Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer: Enceladus Plume Composition and Structure.” Science 311(5766), pp. 1419-1422. [online at CiteULike.org]

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Following the discovery of what appeared to be an ice-filled crater early this year, the MARSIS team announced that they have discovered a thin layer of water ice surrounding the southern polar ice cap. Though the layer is not very thick, its extent means that it contains about half as much water as the southern polar cap.

These findings were announced at this year’s Lunar and Planetary Sciences conference. As soon as they are published, or more details emerge, I will cover the story further here.

Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams writes about a potential replacement for Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph (TPF-C) that would be “faster, better, and cheaper.” The basic idea is that the Coronagraph part of the TPF-C would be an independent, free-flying “Occulter” that would be combined with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to recreate the scientific mission of the TPF-C. The best part is that the Occulter could fit within the budget of NASA’s Discover class of vehicles, for which it currently has solicitations for proposals.

In light of the pressure being applied to NASA because of TPF and Europa Orbiter delays, it seems to me that this potential Occulter mission has risen to a very high scientific priority. Also, combining the effective budget of the TPF mission with the JWST would help stop the slide in its launch date. While I can hardly wait until April when the proposals are due, I am buoyed by the prospect of TPF proceeding after all. Thanks Paul!

The image on the right is an artist’s conception of the view of the Pluto/Charon system from the surface of P2, one of Pluto’s recently discovered moons (credit: NASA). While we’ve known for a month or so that Pluto has two “new” moons the paper announcing the discovery was just published Thursday. Their discovery is a truly fine example of observational astronomy, and I thought I would share some top-rate science with you all. Here I examine a pair of papers, one announcing and detailing the discovery of P1 and P2, the other speculating on their genesis and implications for the nature of the Pluto/Charon system.

Citations

• Weaver, H.A. and 8 others (2006), “Discovery of Two New Satellites of Pluto”, Nature 439(7070), pp. 943-945 [online at CiteULike.org]
• Stern, S.A. and 8 others (2006), “A Giant Impact Origin for Pluto’s Small Moons and Satellite Multiplicity in the Kuiper Belt”, Nature 439(7070), pp. 946-948 [online at CiteULike.org]

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